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Platform providers (such as IBM, AWS, Google, etc) are facing growing demands from their customers to publish connectors to their platforms faster. Their customers and business users want to easily access and expose the data that is locked in silos across the cloud-based apps and services they need to be successful in their roles. All the while, customers need an open platform that can help reduce time-to-market when building new apps that rely on this connectivity for rapid application development.

These platform providers need a way to quickly onboard new connectors into their platform to satisfy their customers. The challenge? It takes up a lot of developer time to build new connectors. Plus, APIs are always changing so the cost of maintaining APIs will continue to increase. Now, these organizations can increase the integration capabilities of their platforms by leveraging our catalog of more than 120+ Elements (pre-built connectors) - delivering a low-code/no-code experience around third-party connectivity.

Element Onboarding 101

Cloud Elements has recently released a ground-breaking new technology (see more about Element Builder below) that allows for the automatic distribution of our 120+ Elements. The connectors, or Elements, are published into leading platforms and all versioning and connector maintenance is managed by Cloud Elements. By reducing the development effort, these companies can begin delivering the value of pre-built integration content and tooling to their users almost immediately.

The Cloud Elements Layer of Abstraction

Our API Abstraction Layer creates a uniform set of REST APIs, creating canonicalized endpoints, that can be easily consumed on any platform. We simplify onboarding new connectors by incorporating the necessary components and requirements of any platform’s unique data model into each Element. In addition to taking care of ongoing API maintenance our team offers a Toolkit to assist your team when they Build Elements, Map Data, and Write Formulas.

The Technology

Element Builder, an integration tool that extends the capabilities of Elements or build new Elements from scratch, has been enhanced to distribute Elements as connectors into leading API connector marketplaces. In Element Builder objects, or resources, and features such as authentication, paging, errors and search are normalized. Once resources are normalized, Elements are extended to leading platforms using the uniform data model. Then, with our new “generate” option, Elements are distributed to leading platforms such as AWS and IBM. You can learn more about how developers can now deploy integrations as AWS Lambdas with Element Builder here.

From Our Partner IBM

“We chose Cloud Elements because of their novel canonical data and object model which normalizes connectivity to cloud applications,” said Tony Curcio, Director of Application Integration at IBM. “This approach helps accelerate IBM’s time to market for these new connectors in IBM App Connect. In working with Cloud Elements, we look forward to a significant reduction in the development time, cost and maintenance for our platform.”